As you probably already know, while mindfulness has become the new “buzzword” in recent years - giving birth to a whole industry in corporate training and well-being programs, the practice of mindfulness goes back thousands of years. Biblical scriptures encouraged us to “Be still” and become present to God. A powerful mindfulness exercise if ever there was one.

So why all the airplay?

Exit auto pilot

Rafal Olechowski via Adobe Stock

It’s simple. We live in a world, and spend a large chunk of our lives in workplaces, in which we’re up against more and more mindlessness. A recent study reported that people make, on average, 15 decisions every day in a mindless frame of mind with 96% of respondents reporting operating on autopilot daily.

There are many different practices and tools to cultivate mindfulness. They all flow from simply paying attention to what we are paying attention to; practicing being a ‘detached observer’ of our own inner world. Being attentive lays at the foundation of ‘emotional intelligence’ and all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. The ultimate goal is to train our attention to create a quality of mind that is simultaneously calm and clear.

So if you get nothing else from reading this article, I encourage you to pause right now (yes, you have time) and to follow your breath in and out – three times, breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. Allowing your breath to settle into its own rhythm, and as you simply follow it in and out, observe the rise and fall of your chest and belly as you breathe. Pretty simple huh? Once you’re done, notice the subtle way it shifts how you’re feeling.

A few long calm deep breaths can 'disrupt your default' and enhance your ability to objectively observe how you are thinking, feeling and doing in any given moment. In doing so it can short-circuit an amygdala hijack and save you from succumbing to those fear-driven primal urges that, let's be honest, rarely result in positive outcomes.

Develop self-mastery

A second pillar of building mindfulness is growing in our own self-awareness and self-mastery. Building from the foundation attention – looking at how you’re looking at life – it goes one step further – to better understanding your cognitive and emotional responses. That is, not just observing what you are thinking, feeling and doing but asking yourself why and what other thoughts, emotions and actions might be more fruitful in the present moment? For example, what are you telling yourself about the person who has just triggered a strong emotional response in you? How is that interpretation showing up in your body – in your physical sensations, in your posture, your breathing and facial muscles? How else could you be interpreting this situation? What might be a more constructive way of approaching this person or situation?

These sort of questions lay at the heart of developing soft skills and raising your EQ, both of which are increasingly valuable in an age when so many IQ tasks can be outsourced to AI.

Cultivating compassion calls on us to look inward, to where we can have more compassion for ourselves in any given moment. To forgiving our fallibility, owning our insecurities and being kinder to ourselves when we mess up. It also calls on us to look outward, to consider the emotional landscape others are navigating; to how another person is viewing a situation, to the fears, concerns, hurts and insecurities they are wrestling with in any given moment.

During a conversation with Rich Fernandez, CEO of Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute for my podcast, he shared that “once you understand what will be of greatest service to another person you can decide how best to take care of what they care about.” This doesn’t mean that we give up our own agenda. Rather it means being thoughtful in how we manage trade-offs and conflicting concerns, motivations and intentions.

Many leaders, in their striving to achieve targets and impress stakeholders (or keep the wolves at bay), can get so caught up with their own agenda that they fail to take time to consider what is important to the people around them, to look for the common ground and to lead from that place – with head and heart.

So if you often find yourself feeling scattered, reacting defensively or simply struggling to feel the sense of calm, confidence and clear thinking you’d like, rest assured you've got everything it takes to make positive changes. Simply committing to putting simple mindfulness techniques into practice in your life – even if just starting out with a few deep mindful breaths – to become more focused, less reactive and better able to remain present and peaceful when those invisible ‘trigger buttons’ get pressed (don’t worry, we’ve all got them!).